Category: sapphics

46. Slippy Sloppy Doodah (from another vagrant song)

Here we are with the gypsy girl
an inspired study I will say
simplicity should flourish best
in some paradise of painters

Inside this landscape, foxes
are our sympathies not with them?
they forage underneath the messy sky
not abased by the wound of loveliness

Guys & girls & bishops
all you vagrant utopians veering
heroic as fucking gasoline
without single-mindedness or status

No pressure; exclude pursuit; open
oh, open now!
bold & childlike inconsistencies
just life inside this void

Together maybe we demonstrate the imprecise
our appearances not adequate yet nonetheless
somehow to shine, a fire of faggots
presented in a sorry field
spat upon in destitution’s calling

31. The Dialectic of the Commonplace: Fusing Relics and Trash1

This is really some thing – already the recipe
for wading across the Tone, untrammelled & unnatural.
A protest against its disordered pattern. Stochastically sober
poets wouldn’t swim.

How this turns out & what we will gain – well
all tenets are a challenge now. The non-
neurotypical and their vagrant bones especially are
precisely damaging.

Children, never experience all of this – but start up
squeaking, flying, practically Polish (did I mean
police? or politics? whatever’s next now?
a coffeebar happens.

Colleagues – the geography is obscure, marching
all over us. Revolutionary rigour & concerned confidence.
Decide at 15.29 what is pleasurable & important.
Welcome it & go.

Dreams denying desire. No, conceptually stinking.
Yeah, I genuinely bequeath. An imaginary moment.
The personal will usher in disclosure as crucial variation.
Years of work again.

 

 

1 David Tiffany, In the Poisonous Candy Factory (Capsule Editions, 2013), p 82 [my punctuation]

25. The Stories

We chose something horrible, of course – the stories
all the old scars that form our inheritance
and the yearly repetition of summer & then
what comes after

What comes before smeared all over us now
it’s a cruddy cake we do regret eating
a dog wouldn’t – but aren’t we lacking its sense
of what is?

Hate bubbles up like paint in the August sun
all the stuff we’d taken sticking to us now
the children don’t realise but it covers them
absolutely

The stories mean nothing, are blossom sporing
yet again our dreams: canicide, revolution and
personal fulfilment. We ought to like the world & trust
wisely don’t

14. To Dig out Those Ditches, Then, at Least to Start

Good food does require some care
obedience then to natural process – let
the little ones grow we say, nourished
w/ syrupy pleasure

Sarah will live out of time – only
sad prejudices gendered the Ancient Ones
whatever we mean is irrelevant now
t/ how things are

Yes, the children frolic in the Victoria Gardens
giggling excesses through the shrubbery – look!
vast energies are channelled through them
no need to prune

We shall make cakes, we shall make ropes of
thorns & withies for those high worth individuals
we catch then skulking on the Esplanade: trust
yr disgust & act

2. Out of Order I Said This (The Eternal Delusion)

on and now she just is I heard
everything will be lost to laughter
ok then act and reject cut off
your white hair

these small animals do it you’ve lost
the underlying question come mumbling in all now
that aren’t we trapped in familiar flesh again
I told her

starting again I won’t be here you said
as well this is such a mess a muck up
of beautiful red blossoms commemorating
we shall die

oh words bastard words won out
the frantic grasp high state of light
don’t they just piss you off like nothing
the eternal delusion